Dr. Paul Crane, professor, is the principal investigator on a renewed grant from the National Institute of Aging. The project, ADNI Psychometrics, will receive $2.8 million over the next five years. Investigators will use state-of-the-art statistical approaches to cognitive testing data applied to scientific questions in two data sets: the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) and the Australian Imaging, Biomarker & Lifestyle Flagship Study of Ageing (AIBL).

Collaborating with the UW investigators are colleagues from several institutions around the world, including Brown University, Indiana University, the University of California at Davis, Johns Hopkins University, VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, Boston University, and Rush University Medical Center.

“Our group has been at the forefront of using modern statistical and psychometric methods to optimize scores for cognitive functioning in Alzheimer’s research,” said Crane, who is also an attending physician at Harborview Medical Center. “Our work in the previous cycle focused on memory and executive functioning. This cycle, we will extend that work to consider other cognitive domains. We proposed to use optimized cognitive measures to further our scientific understanding of the earliest changes on the road toward Alzheimer’s disease and to further our understanding of variation in cognitive function among people who have Alzheimer’s disease.”

Crane says that the new funding will enable the pursuit of additional analyses.

ADNI is a public-private partnership to fund extensive data collection on well-characterized older adults as a means to further scientific understanding of aging and Alzheimer’s disease. ADNI participants are enrolled at dozens of research sites across the United States and Canada. ADNI data have been used by investigative teams around the world in around 800 publications to date.

AIBL is an Australian study launched in 2006 of older Australians, also designed to further scientific understanding of aging and Alzheimer’s disease. Participants are enrolled from Perth in Western Australia and from Melbourne. AIBL data have been used in around 200 publications to date.